Low, low, low, low.

1. Art performance at which the two visiting artists were going to employ “transmedia” objects to make music. I fell asleep (it had been a long day, okay?) and we left before it was over, along with 1/3 of the audience. It was that bad. And that dark, meaning that people felt less guilty about sneaking out the back.

2. A lecture/conversation about video games and their place in “the academy.” This had great potential, but I was/am really tired and couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to carry us both through. I bribed my students to go with extra credit and then watched their eyes glaze over.

3. The annual faculty “dance concert.” I paid for these tickets. Real dollars. Real dollars that could have bought me a milkshake and fries from the boutique diner I’ve been obsessing over lately. To be fair, I really enjoyed one of the eight performances. I nearly fell asleep at this too.

Too late, I realized that 2 of these 3 events occurred on THURSDAY NIGHTS. This term I have both of my seminars on Thursdays. This means that I am in class from 9-12 and then again from 2-5. For those of you with the luck of avoiding graduate school experiences in the humanities, you’ll have to take my word for it when I say that yes, sitting in a chair for nearly eight hours straight and thinking really hard is quite draining. Not as draining as teaching, but still.

Too late, I have also come to realize that I’ve pretty much lost all taste for what could be referred to as “high culture.” The discussion where I rant for a long time about how I believe the delineations between high and low culture are completely arbitrary and often misleading will keep for another day. The fact remains that I fell asleep at an art performance, people! But, somehow, manage to stay awake through every episode of Make It or Break It.

I more than “stayed awake” for an exhibit by Kristin Beaver (http://kristinbeaver.com/paintingscurrent.html), which, while not an art performance, I still think counts. Her paintings and the ideas they provoke about artistic mediums and mediation (for me, at least) are compelling. Much more so than a self-indulgent performance of “digital music.”

I enjoyed the one dance performance because it was evocative of real life. It was, obviously, an abstract representation of real life, but the ways that it addressed concepts like labor, collaboration, and chaos were intense and novel. It made a statement about things I care about while also being aesthetically interesting.